Communication between people is dependent upon the context in which the communication takes place. Participants in face-to-face conversations modify their behavior according to who is present, their partner's social mood and sense of urgency and many other things. Because of the importance of context in natural communications, there has been a significant amount of effort placed on understanding and adding context to technology-mediated communications.
Most of the effort has taken place in computer-supported collaboration systems and more recently in chat and instant messaging systems. In this effort, special attention has been directed at providing information about the status of others prior to initiating communication. This has included information such as whether the person is in his/her office typing on the key-board, whether the person is already busy with another conversation, or whether the person is nearby a specific device.
The rapid advances made in communication technologies have given users a plethora of choices to remain in contact with the office, home, etc. However, the pervasiveness of all these new communication devices available to, particularly, those in the office environment have not solved the problem of “phone tagging” or missed calls. The amount of time wasted in the office environment between employees trying to contact each other by phone is still quite staggering. Furthermore, the availability of mobile devices, such as cell phones, Personal digital assistants (PDA), short messaging services, etc., has not helped in alleviating the number of missed calls between employees at any given time.
Traditional telephones do not provide callers with any information about the location of a callee. Traditionally, busy signals by a telephone is indicative of one extreme form of unavailability, but generally, a telephone call has to be completed before its participants can begin communicating. Since telephone callers do not have enough information about the people that they want to call, they often make interrupting calls at unwanted times or to locations that their intended recipients have already left.
Most of today's communication devices do not provide the capability of instantaneously notifying a caller of the callee's availability on such communication mediums as the telephone or voice over IP based devices. For example, a message sent to a user's AOL instant messenger device typically presumes that the receiver of the information is available without any intelligent presence recognition capabilities to the sender of the message.
The use of presence information is well known in the art. Devices such as Webley's Media Switching Platform (MSP), chat systems, etc., use presence information to facilitate communication between two or more individual users. However, these devices only provide awareness information to a person initiating a call if the callee is either logged into the intended communication device or facility being dialed.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustration of a prior art presence information telephony system 100. The prior art system 100 comprises presence server 110, a network based software 120, Click dialer 130, phone network 140, desktop browser 150, calling party 160 and called party 170.
In system 100, the calling party 160 can store information about contacts (i.e., the called parties 170) that the calling party 160 may want to call. The contact information is maintained in a network based software 120 and can be accessed from any web browser 150 that connects to the presence server 110. Software 120 is an “address book” client application that stores names and phone numbers where the contacts are expected to be.
The click dialer 130 enables calls to be made from the presence information in the software 120 by simply selecting a name in the software 120. When a contact name is selected, the system 100 sends a signal to the telephone network 140 which then places two successive calls, one to the caller's phone number and the other to the callee's phone number. The two calls are then bridged together.
In the prior art system 100 shown in FIG. 1, when the calls are bridged together, the system 100 automatically dials the telephone numbers provided in the software 120 without checking to determine the presence of the party dialed. If either one of the parties called happens to be on the phone or not at the location designated by the telephone number, the caller simply either experiences a busy signal or is provided with a voice mail to leave a message.
Although the system in FIG. 1 uses presence information to contact a user, the presence information is only limited to one contact telephone number with an associated designated location. Furthermore, when the caller 160 clicks on the callee's 170 name in the software 120, the system assumes that the callee 170 is going to be present at the designated telephone number. If the callee 170 is unavailable, either because the callee 170 is busy on the phone or not at the designated number, the system is not able to automatically call the callee back with the same phone call. When the system encounters a busy signal, the caller 160 has to call back at a different time with the hope that the callee 170 will be available.
Also, in most of the prior art presence communication devices, the caller or sender of a message can send a message which may be placed in the receiving party's mail box or voice mail. It is then up to the receiving party to decide whether to read the message or return a call if required.
Other prior art presence systems have used video cameras placed in a user's office thereby allowing the user's colleagues to glimpse at what the other was doing. However, privacy concerns, as well as the need for lower bandwidth requirements made these presence information systems inappropriate.
Communication systems have advanced during the past decade from telephone to Personal Computer, soft phone applications, handheld devices, etc. Today, users of these devices want enhanced and traditional phone and email features to be integrated with new communication means. Prior art systems allow users to make calls without requiring the user to dial phone numbers. For instance, calls can be made by clicking or speaking a user's name from an address book that then automatically dials the user's phone number.
However, these prior art systems do not provide a user with the ability to delay phone calls to a party who is not available to take the call or who does not want to be disturbed at the time the call is made.